GigaOM

Drew Perkins, the CTO of Infinera, which sells Internet optical transport equipment, says that video is soaking up the Internet’s bandwidth — and lucky for him, driving the optical networking business.

For those of you who don’t know what the optical transport layer is, it’s the bottom layer plumbing of the Internet. Back in 2000/2001 when Perkins and his colleagues started the company he was optimistic that the Internet would still grow significantly — and of course they were proven right. “Back then, we thought the optical transport layer was about 10 gigabit technology. We’ll need some thing more than 40 gigabit, up to 100 gigabit and higher as the Internet grows.”

What’s driving the growth? Video. “Video traffic is clearly the biggest consumer on the Internet,” and the addition of video traffic swamps all other traffic. “Video will completely swamp the network,” and there will be exponentially increasing bandwidth demand as video applications grow.

This effects the optical network industry because service providers will have to buy more capacity and deliver it faster. Every year, more technology means more workload. But with conventional technology this will break the network and cause huge problems, says Perkins. Infinera is looking to use photon-integrated circuitry to help solve this problem.

Oooh, our first panel of the morning, Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs. We’ve got a six-person lineup to give us their perspectives, and our own Alistair Croll to throw them questions. The lineup includes:

• Christophe Bisciglia, Senior Software Engineer with Google
• Jason Hoffman, Founder, CTO of Joyent
• Tony Lucas, CEO of XCalibre Communications
• Lew Moorman, SVP of Strategy and Corp Dev, Rackspace
• Geva Perry, CMO of GigaSpaces
• Joe Weinman, VP of Strategic Solutions at AT&T

Here are some notes:

Alistair: When we are moving to clouds, are we selling our souls? Should we be happy with our cloud overlords?

AT&T Joe: I have a prediction that is not surprising. There will be a proprietary stack and there will be an open business model based on the cloud that will leverage standards, commodization, price-compression, and differential vs dynamic pricing.

GigaSpace’s Geva: There’s room for both models. People are talking about specialized clouds.

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“I’m the systems administrator for a small book shop in Seattle.”

“Remember this is just a very small snapshot at the beginning of a movement.”

Shows slideshow by Animoto of people at the Next Web conference in Europe (company analyzes music for mood changes and sets slideshow to that timing). What’s so special about Animoto? They have no servers. They have nothing. They have desktop apps, but they have no server infrastructure. But most of what they do is pretty intensive. They use Amazon S3 storage, Amazon EC2, SQS.

April 15/16 they launched a Facebook app. Friends would be notified of that little movie. At that point 25,000 customers. Started signing up 25,000 customers an hour. Imagine if you came up to a VC and said I kind of need money for 5,000 servers, I don’t know if we’re going to be popular or not.

What this cloud computing does, one of the biggest lessons to take home today, is moving infrastructure from a capital expense to a variable cost model.

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VMware’s co-founder and chief scientist Mendel Rosenblum is on the couch, getting grilled by Om and Arnie Berman, chief technology strategist, Cowen and Company.

Rosenblum says:

Virtualization is a wide term. What we’re seeing is, at some level, decoupling software from hardware is a just a better way of doing it. That is only a piece of what virtualization can do.

Om: You’re already thinking beyond plain vanilla virtualization. Are we at the stage where virtualization gets commoditized?

Rosenblum: You can buy your machines from Dell and just check a box to have this included. Our vision is this plugs into the distributed system that manages the whole data center. I agree with you that bits of code that come bundled with the hardware are becoming commoditized. But the value proposition of really smart software that moves things around has fortunately not been commoditized yet.
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Jonathan Yarmis, VP Advanced, Emerging and Disruptive Technologies at AMR Research is giving us a mini-note to open up the day.

He says:

“The world is about to change, and change in profoundly interesting ways.”

“The enterprise itself hasn’t figured out how to embrace cloud computing; users are figuring it out very quickly.”

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Charter Communications this morning backed off plans to deploy an advertising system that had stirred privacy fears about the way user data was intercepted and anger over an inability to truly opt out of the program. The cable provider said back in May that it was working with NebuAd, a startup in Redwood City, Calif., to use deep-packet inspection technology to target advertisements based on users’ web surfing habits.

Now it’s backpedaling, with spokeswoman Anita Lamont saying the cable company had never set a firm date to trial the service. More importantly, according to Lamont, Charter has taken a step back from deploying the technology in order to address user concerns about privacy. Whether this is a big blow for NebuAd remains to be seen. Charter hasn’t definitively bailed on NebuAd just yet, and the startup also counts WOW, EmbarQ, CenturyTel and Broadstripe among its clientèle. For more on NebuAd, see our interview with CEO Bob Dykes. Continue Reading